what's this, me matey?

This site is a collective. If you don't know what that means, allow me to elaborate: It is a collection of fanlistings, cliques, and possibly other stuff. (A fanlisting being a listing of fans of a certain subject, and a clique being a group of members with a similar interest or quality.) This collective will house any fanlistings of mine (I doubt I'll be starting any cliques, but you never know, I guess), but also those of others.

This collective is themed around the Great Sea from The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. It came about when I suddenly wanted to start up a few fanlistings, and thought a map of the Great Sea used as a menu would be "wicked". I just had to make this site; how often do two great ideas coincide like that? (Judging from the number of sites I have, apparently quite often!)

If you didn't know it already, I believe that the Great Sea is the best environment (OK, an idea for an environment...-__-;;) ever created in a Zelda game (or any game, for that matter). Sure, it had many flaws, but there is nothing that stands out more clearly to me in my videogame history than that first exhilarating trip on the King of Red Lions. *sigh*...

This site might look simple, to be sure, but it was certainly no piece of cake to create. Actually, everything's so simple because I was so sick of coding and designing by the time I finished the bane of all banes: The Menu Map! I thought there were at least five solutions to how to get the map to light up on hover; I tried three of them (and multiple variations therein), to no success, and finally took the dreaded fifth option of splicing the map into 49 separate images and making 49 more of them, except highlighted. (The fourth option only worked on Opera, so I didn't even try it.)

By the time I had finished, I was certainly in no mood to try to get the background image of Link & Co. to change with the islands, and forget about theming each page of this site to a different island! So I just went ahead and finished it off with a little menu beneath the content box, which had to be done with floated images, as opposed to image maps, and therefore was quite difficult. My reasoning? "Leave the map for the sites in the collective, not the menu."

Well, I'm pretty much done rambling, except to say that I considered making this linkware on Nevermore Designs, but then realized how ridiculous a notion that was. After all, this layout is quite specifically designed for a collective, and the map would look rather bad on an actual website.

Now that you've read about the Great Sea, go off to visit the islands!